What if?

There's this 20 year old girl, and she just found out she's pregnant. It seemed like such a great thing, but her boyfriend split -- he was totally weirded out. She has an abortion scheduled for 4 days from now. She spent all this money on tuition the last few years, and she's gotta finish school, so having to raise a baby alone would screw everything up. She goes to a Christian college, so she can't tell anybody. She really doesn't know of any other options. This is it, there's nothing she can do. She has trouble sleeping at night, struggling with the turmoil over this decision. But she knows if she can just get through this, she can move on with her life, and this will eventually move to the back, and she'll forget about it, and everything will be okay.

But what if she found herself in conversation with two other people -- a couple? They're about 35. This couple got married when they were about 23, so they've been married for about 12 years. A couple of years into their marriage, they said "Hey, let's start a family." But now it's 9 years later, and they still haven't had a child. Now they hear words like "infertility", and they have that haunting, sinking feeling that they will never be able to conceive. But what if they end up talking to this girl, not really knowing her story. What if they end up saying to her "there is nothing we would love more than to have a child to raise. Wouldn't that be the greatest thing in the world?"

What if another person joined the conversation, not really knowing either of their stories, ends up saying, "You know, I was adopted. Part of my inward journey, my healing, has been to realize that it wasn't that I was abandoned, it was that somebody took me in, and I am so grateful."

What if these people were joined by another couple, a 52-year-old couple, who had 3 kids, who had just dropped their youngest kid off at college. They've known this time was coming, where they would be "empty-nesters." They've been wondering what to do with the house, and with all the extra time they will have. So they've been praying for the last 9 months or so, saying "God, we have all these extra resources now, our space, our time. Take it, use it however you want."

What if all these people ended up in the same conversation, not really knowing each others' stories at first. Maybe things would begin to open up for our 20-year-old girl. Maybe things would begin to shift. Maybe her world would expand a bit. Maybe her present condition would begin to have hope.

This story was adapted from Rob Bell's sermon at Mars Hill on 9/26/5, available here